The speculation about how women will vote has been prominent in Texas, especially now that Rep. Beto O’Rourke’s challenge to Sen. Ted Cruz’s re-election has shaken assumptions about the security of the Republican Party’s monopoly. Much of this discussion has focused on potential unrest among suburban women and whether the moderate Republicans among them will question their partisan leanings.

Don’t count on it.

The most recent University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll offers little evidence to support expectations of significant partisan shifts among women. A well-documented partisan gender gap is already a political fact of life: More women identify as Democrats compared with men. But beyond that, O’Rourke does not look to benefit from a new tidal wave of female support. In the most recent UT/TT Poll, 49 percent of likely female voters said that they would be supporting O’Rourke, 47 percent said that they would be supporting Cruz. And among the much-discussed suburban woman, the results were essentially the same, with Cruz edging out O’Rourke 49 to 48 percent.

The responses to several questions about gender and discrimination in that same poll illustrate how strongly the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination likely influenced partisans, but not in the expected direction. In fact, the opposite happened: Republican women expressed high levels of support for Kavanaugh and became more skeptical of the #MeToo movement in the process.

Partisanship, not gender, drives opinions. And Kavanaugh illustrates this. Seventy-eight percent of Republican women and 84 percent of Republican men hold favorable opinions of him, and over 90 percent of both Republican men and women said that they would have voted to confirm him.

The #MeToo movement also plays into these attitudes. As a whole, female attitudes toward the movement stayed remarkably consistent, but with stark underlying shifts among partisans. Approximately 41 percent hold a favorable opinion of the movement, and 30 percent hold an unfavorable one. Among Republican women, the share holding a negative attitude toward the movement increased by 16 points, from 44 percent to 60 percent, in the eight-month period between the two polls. Only 1 in 10 GOP women hold a favorable view of the #MeToo movement today.

Among suburban women, who are not, of course, exclusively Republican, there’s no indication that their attitudes differ significantly from Texas women overall in this area. Half of suburban women say that they would have voted to confirm Kavanaugh, the same share as women overall. Forty percent of suburban women hold a favorable view of the #MeToo movement, while 31 percent hold an unfavorable view. Among women overall, the split is 41 to 31 percent. Forty-two percent of suburban women, and women overall, think that the attention to sexual misconduct is leading to the unfair treatment of men.

This all adds to the obstacles facing O’Rourke.

Much of the initial speculation about the impact of these events on women’s political attitudes clearly underestimated the current power of partisanship and the attitudes that accompany it. The biggest takeaway from this poll is that the politics of gender, and in particular, the spectacle of the Kavanaugh hearing, did little to loosen women from their partisan predispositions toward candidates. If anything, the terms of debate surrounding Kavanaugh’s confirmation further politically polarized their views in the current debates around gender.

Regardless of what happens in the midterm elections in Texas, Democrats can’t rely on the current discussion about gender and equality to convert partisans of either gender to their side. Any reliance on an expected surge of female support generated by partisan conversion is likely to be met with disappointment, at least in the current environment. The #MeToo movement and the Kavanaugh nomination undoubtedly mobilized many Democratic women across the country to engage in politics as Democrats and progressives. But in Texas, suburban and Republican women appear unmoved. If O’Rourke needs some combination of massive Democratic mobilization and largescale Republican defections to rescue a campaign trailing in virtually every poll, Republican women are not going to save him.

Jim Henson is the director of the Texas Politics Project at The University of Texas at Austin. Joshua Blank is manager of polling and research of the Texas Politics Project at The University of Texas at Austin.